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  (photo credit)        The usaelectionpolls.com website has interesting state tabulations by racial group for exit polls for Democratic primaries and caucuses. Given Senator Clinton’s white-framed, racialized remarks on white voters, exit poll data are revealing and relevant to numerous recent debates in the media and elsewhere: 

White Voters in the 2008 Exit Polls (29 states)

Senator Clinton got a larger percentage of (exit poll) white voters than Senator Obama in 23 of the 29 states listed here, and also in the more recent states of North Carolina and Indiana. (25 of 31)

Black Voters in the 2008 Exit Polls (23 states)

Senator Obama got the majority of black voters (alway over 67%) in all 23 states listed, plus in recent primaries of North Carolina and Indiana not listed. (25 of 25)

Latino Voters in the 2008 Exit Polls (12 states)

Senator Clinton got a larger percentage of Latino voters than Senator Obama in 9 of the 12 states listed. (9 of 12)

Asian Voters in One 2008 Exit Poll (one state)

Only one state had enough Asian American voters to report, and Clinton carried them by a large percentage in California. (1 of 1)

There are several interpretations of these striking patterns in exit poll data given by media pundits and political bloggers. Some are arguing the majority of white Democratic Party voters going for Clinton in most states just means that these whites (and other nonblack voters) are choosing the candidate more in line with their political-economic views. Another plausible interpretation of the skew in figures for white voters, as well as for Latino and Asian American voters, is that some significant percentage of these groups hold racial stereotypes and negative feelings about Black men from the still-common white racial frame, and that makes it difficult for some to vote for a Black man for president.

There is significant evidence (here and here) showing the prevalence of stereotyped thinking among a majority of whites about Black Americans in the social science literature. In this regard, as I have argued before, Senator Obama has an uphill battle, especially since the majority of white voters do not vote in Democratic primaries and have yet to be heard from on whether they will exhibit racialized preferences for a white candidate, that is, Senator McCain.

It is also possible that these exit polls are exaggerating to some degree the white support for Senator Obama, since there is pressure for whites to tell pollsters voting preferences that make them look unprejudiced–pressure on some who voted for a candidate besides Obama may lead them to say to pollsters they did vote for Obama. We do not have the data to make more than speculative judgments about the full meaning of these voting data, but it would be surprising if they are not connected, directly or indirectly, to the dominant white racial framing of African Americans.

Many media analysts, as well as some campaign consultants (and Senator Clinton recently) have misread exit poll data. White voters who are not voting for Senator Obama in most of these states are likely to be at least half middle class and upper middle class — and thus are not the proverbial “white working class” or “white blue collar” voters many analysts seem fixated on. Is the reason white middle class voters, and their possible racist reservations about voting for Senator Obama, are neglected in the analyses because most of the media and other public commentators are white middle class?

Moreover, one very striking thing about these data is that neither Senator Clinton, nor anyone else among powerful white political, economic, or religious leaders, seems to be willing to dissect and/or condemn the likely racist framing and motivation that is leading many white voters to shy away from voting for Senator Obama. In my view, his only chance to win in November, assuming he is the Democratic candidate, is to make the white racist frame a political and societal issue and to attack it head on, rather than to let it do its usual huge, often backstage, damage. Otherwise, assuming the social science data are correct about white views on racial matters, he has only a remote chance of winning. 

In an article at Salon.com, Joe Conason suggests that Hilary Clinton’s latest remarks about the role of race in the campaign was a case of “channeling George Wallace.” (photo credit: Kevin Lamarque, Reuters via Salon.com) In case you missed it, here’s what she said:

“… Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. There’s a pattern emerging here.”

Conason bends over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt here, writing:

While I still cannot believe she actually intended any such nefarious meaning, she seemed to be equating “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans.” Which is precisely what Wallace and his cohort used to do with their drawling refrain about welfare and affirmative action.

I think that Conason is too forgiving of Hilary and should, by all rights, call out her racism.    And, while the reference to George Wallace here sort of fits, it’s not the best or most appropriate historical referrent. Indeed, there’s a long history of white feminists who have deployed similar strategies when the terms of the political game are set up as “gender” versus “race” with white women standing in as the gendered subjects while black men signify race. A more apt comparison would be to Susan B. Anthony.   Early in her activism Anthony was committed to the abolition of slavery, in favor of equal rights for blacks and was an ally with Frederick Douglass through the Equal Rights Association. But Anthony abandoned the fight for racial justice after the passage of the 15th Amendment granted voting rights to black men, but not to women - neither black nor white.   Faced with the sexism of a constitutional amendment that specifically granted voting rights to some men and not to women, she retaliated by arguing that educated white women would make better voters than “ignorant” black or immigrant men.


Hilary Clinton is faced with a dilemma similar to the one Susan B. Anthony faced.  Clinton faces a deeply sexist political system that not only doesn’t take women seriously and demeans their accomplishments.  At the same time that the mainstream media has been swept up in a (new) discussion of race and racism in the current election, yet there has been relatively less recognition of gender and sexism in the election. And, the mainstream media has guilty of perpetuating some pretty heinous misogyny, as Besty Reed points out:

she has been likened to Lorena Bobbitt (by Tucker Carlson); a “hellish housewife” (Leon Wieseltier); and described as “witchy,” a “she-devil,” “anti-male” and “a stripteaser” (Chris Matthews). Her loud and hearty laugh has been labeled “the cackle,” her voice compared to “fingernails on a blackboard” and her posture said to look “like everyone’s first wife standing outside a probate court.” As one Fox News commentator put it, “When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, take out the garbage.” Rush Limbaugh, who has no qualms about subjecting audiences to the spectacle of his own bloated physique, asked his listeners, “Will this country want to actually watch a woman get older before their eyes on a daily basis?” Perhaps most damaging of all to her electoral prospects, very early on Clinton was deemed “unlikable.” Although other factors also account for that dislike, much of the venom she elicits (”Iron my shirt,” “How do we beat the bitch?”) is clearly gender-specific.

Unfortunately, in the face of such bold misogyny Clinton has responded much like Susan B. Anthony.   Rather than reaching out and trying to recognize commonalities of racism and sexism, Clinton has time and again used Obama’s race — and the racism of white voters — to her advantage.   It’s not quite the same as saying that a white woman “deserves” the vote (or in this case, the presidency) more than a black man, but it comes from the same tradition of white feminist racism.

Senators Obama and Clinton have brought up the huge racial disparities in U.S. arrests and incarceration, yet have not explained yet what they would do about this distinctive aspect of systemic racism. A New York Times reporter has recently summarized two reports on extreme racial inequality in arrests and incarceration. One report is by the Sentencing Project and the other by Human Rights Watch. 

          The article accents the all-too-well-known impact of systemic racism in our criminal “injustice system”:

(Photo credit) More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates. (Italics added.) 

Same rates of drug use, yet huge racial differences in how those who use drugs are treated by the criminal injustice system. People who read good newspapers and magazines probably have some sense of this reality, but they likely do not know a central fact accented in these reports: 

that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the war on drugs, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks. 

That is, now racially inegalitarian policing has little rationale except for white-racist framing and racial profiling: 

In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980. More than four in five of the arrests were for possession of banned substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the latest F.B.I. data. Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: they are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men, according to the Human Rights Watch report. Others are arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later released, but with a permanent blot on their records anyway.

The racial differentials are striking: 

Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the population, F.B.I. data show. . . . [One] report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available . . . , indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.

The Human Rights Watch report adds this bit on the stats too:

Across the 34 states, a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman.  In 16 states, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at rates between 10 and 42 times greater than the rate for whites. The 10 states with the greatest racial disparities in prison admissions for drug offenders are: Wisconsin, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Such extreme bias in the criminal injustice system has huge domino effects, negative impacts, within most African American communities, especially those mostly of working class and low-income families. The Times article cites Ryan King, analyst with the Sentencing Project, on the significance of his report:

“Arresting hundreds of thousands of young African-American men hasn’t ended street-corner drug sales.” A shift of resources toward drug treatment and social services rather than wholesale incarceration, he said, would do more to improve conditions in blighted neighborhoods. 

Once again, a sensible approach to what is in effect a public health problem like alcohol abuse and addiction—and is treated that way in numerous more advanced countries—seems beyond the reach of a society whose social problems like crime, as much research shows, are still fundamentally grounded in racism and classism. Once again a recent (March 2008) United Nations report is more concerned with reducing this racial inequality in (photo credit) sentencing than the US government and legal system, which the UN calls on to take action. (See March 2008 Recommendations of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination)

In an item related in many fundamental ways to the protests yesterday, the New York Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against the NYPD for its “stop and frisk” practice on behalf of a New York Post reporter, Leonardo Blair (pictured here, photo from NYPost). In an ironic twist, the New York Post, a conservative rag owned by Rupert Murdoch, the same day ran an editorial in favor of the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” policy, asserting that any decrease in this racially biased practice would result in “crime and chaos.” The reality of living in a police state - and make no mistake, New York City is a police state - is that you never leave home without ID. If you don’t have state-issued ID on you, then you’re subject to being detained by the police until they can “verify your identity.” And, once they stop you, even without probable cause, they collect your name, address and date of birth for their database. But of course, it’s a policy that doesn’t get applied equally. As a white woman that frequently passes for straight, I often skate past those sorts of searches. My fellow New Yorkers who are black and brown, like the reporter in the NYCLU’s lawsuit, are not so fortunate. Leo Blair, a Jamaican immigrant and graduate of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, tells his own story of what happened when he was stopped by the police (from the NY Post):

I was just trying to get home.


It was 8:20 p.m. Wednesday, and I had just finished parking my 1993 Toyota Camry along Arnow Avenue in the Allerton section of The Bronx, where I have been living with my family since graduating from Columbia University last May.


Less than a block from my door, I heard a car’s squeaking brakes. I would have ignored the sound if I hadn’t seen an NYPD squad car out of the corner of my eye. I was relieved for a moment - until I saw the officers’ faces.


“Can you tell us what you were doing coming from that car?” asked the driver, a Hispanic officer whose name I later learned was Castillo.


“What?” I asked.


The street was virtually empty. Officer Castillo jumped out of the car.


“Do you understand English!” he demanded. “Answer the question!”


“No, no hablo ingles,” I quipped. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have said that to any cop, but I found his tone surprising and insulting.


Officer Castillo peppered me with questions in Spanish until I interrupted: “What do you mean by ‘What was I doing coming from that car?’ That’s my car!”


“So you speak English!” Officer Castillo exploded.


“Put your hands in the air!” he shouted. My arms shot up. He frisked me. His partner, Officer Reynolds, rifled through my rucksack.


The search ended quickly and, thinking they were done, I let my hands fall.


Bad idea.


“Did I tell you to put your hands down?” Castillo barked.


He pinned my left arm, cuffed my wrist while ordering me to put my hands behind my back. His partner then took away my cellphone, which had started ringing in my pocket.


“C’mon, man,” I said. “I live right there. Let me call my aunt and uncle inside the house.”


I felt like I was being kidnapped. Castillo told me I was guilty of “disobeying an order.”


Sitting in the back of the squad car, a million thoughts were exploding in my head: What if I told them I just graduated from Columbia with a master’s degree in journalism? That I was a reporter with The Post? Should it matter?


“What did I do?” I asked when we arrived at the 49th Precinct station house. “Why am I being arrested?”


“Keep walking. This is not an arrest. You’re getting a summons,” Officer Castillo said.


Inside, Officer Reynolds shoved me into a cell. Digging through my bag, Officer Castillo picked out my driver’s license and said, “Look at this. He is not even from the projects.”


I angrily shouted, “Because I am black that means I’m supposed to be from the projects? That’s profiling and you know it!”


“Tsk, tsk,” Castillo replied.


When Officer Reynolds returned, I again asked why I had been incarcerated. “This is not incarceration. Do you know what incarceration means?” he said.


I unloaded: “I have a master’s degree from Columbia University. I am a reporter for the New York Post. What do you mean this is not incarceration?”


The air froze. Officer Castillo kept writing, but I watched his face go flush.


“Now I understand what black people mean in this country when they talk about things like this,” I said to Officer Reynolds.


“What do you mean? I am black, too,” he said.


“That’s what makes it so shameful,” I said. “You stood there and watched him cuff me for no reason and you said nothing.” He walked away.


At 9:04 p.m., 10 minutes after I was put in the cell, Officer Castillo let me out.


“Mr. Blair,” he said. “You are free to go.”


“What did I do?” I asked again.


“You will see on the summons,” he said. The two pink slips I received showed complaints for making “unreasonable noise” and “disobeying a lawful order.”

Most black men, and many black women and Latino men and women, in New York have a story similar to Blair’s. Very few white people have similar stories. And, there is data that gives a fuller picture to the racial disparity of “stop and frisk” racism. According to data released earlier this week, New York City police officers stopped more people on the streets during the first three months of 2008 than during any quarter in the six years the Department has reported the data.


In 2007, the NYPD stopped about 469,000 New Yorkers – almost 1,300 people every day. Eighty-eight percent were completely innocent. Though they make up only a quarter of the City’s population, more than half of those stopped were black. Another 30 percent were Latino. Though whites make up more than 35 percent of New York City’s population, they were only 11 percent of those stopped. In 2006 and 2007, blacks and Latinos were the target of about 90 percent of the nearly one million stop-and-frisk encounters.


The NYCLU’s lawsuit also challenges the legality of a database the NYPD maintains with the names and addresses of every person stopped and frisked by the police, even though more than 90 percent of those people, like Blair, have done nothing wrong. That police database likely now has the names and home addresses of over one million law-abiding New Yorkers, as I said, this is what it’s like to live in a police state.


Yesterday, Joe wrote about the ‘foundations of racism.’ When I think about those foundations here in New York, I see them in lots of structures, such as these current policing practices. And, I see these foundations of racism in the graves of Africans who came here in chains to build lower Manhattan. I see these foundations of racism in contemporary exhibits like the one called “Bodies,” that trades on the bodies of Chinese prisoners who may have been executed. I see the foundations in the bodies of the black and brown people locked up who make up 95% of those incarcerated at Rikers, often as a result of racially biased “stop and frisk” racism. These foundations of racism, built quite literally on the bodies of non-white people, are at the heart of what Bauman and Giroux talk about when they write of the biopolitics of disposability.

The AP is reporting that hundreds were arrested today at One Police Plaza. I was there, didn’t get arrested, but interviewed some people there about why they were at the protest, why they were getting arrested, and their experiences with racism in New York City. Here’s the (rough cut) of the video (about 5 minutes):

As I have been reading a lot about “race” matters and U.S. elections, including the views and discussions of Dr. Wright and Senator Obama, I have also been working on a book on the white racial frame and its long history. This makes me think a lot about the roots and foundations underlying today’s issues of racism. For this project, I have been doing a lot of research on the history of slavery and legal segregation. Clearly, these are the foundation of this country, with huge continuing significance.


One reason that the bloody realities of slavery, and later the near slavery of legal segregation, have shaped this society so fundamentally is because from their first decades they were legitimated by a dominant racial framing, firmly imbedded in private and state bureaucracies, and firmly legalized under North American laws. The development of the systemic oppression of Africans and indigenous peoples was made possible by the increasing organizational power of bureaucratized European and colonial companies and states. The norms of such military and other state and private bureaucracies accented stability, discipline, calculability of results, and impersonality. Mass killings and attacks were possible without bureaucracy, but recurring wars on Indians and a large-scale system of African American enslavement were not. Then, as in more recent times, extensive oppression requires complex organization and organizational agents and actors. Central to this bureaucratization and legitimation of slavery was the English and North American legal system. The legal system was, and still is, much more than just laws for by means of judges and other government actors, it enshrines and protects the elite-controlled hierarchical structure of society. In the North American case the legal system enshrined the views and values of the governing elite and, thus, a highly inegalitarian social structure for the new society.


The foundation of this legal and government-bureaucratic system is the U.S. Constitution. In 1787, in Philadelphia, fifty-five white men met and created a constitution for what has been called the “first democratic nation.” They were of European origin, mostly well-off for their day, and or had been slaveowners. Many others profited as merchants, shippers, lawyers, bankers from the trade in slaves, commerce in slave-produced agricultural products, or supplying provisions to slaveholders and slave-traders. In the preamble the founders cite “We the People,” but this did encompass those enslaved–one fifth of the population. As I show in Racist America, slavery was central to the making of this U.S. Constitution. At least seven sections of the Constitution protected the 140-year-old system of slavery: (1) Article 1, Section 2 counts slaves as three fifths of a person; (2) Article 1, Sections 2 and 9 apportion taxes using the three-fifths formula; (3) Article 1, Section 8 gives Congress authority to suppress slave insurrections; (4) Article 1, Section 9 prevents abolishing the slave trade before 1808; (5) Article 1, Sections 9 and 10 exempt slave-made goods from export duties; (6) Article 4, Section 2 requires the return of fugitive slaves; and (7) Article 4, Section 4 stipulates that the federal government must help states put down domestic violence, including slave uprisings. This is the same Constitution (and the same founders like GW) that so many people today say we should treasure and look back to as our model for equality, liberty, and justice as we deal with racism and other troubling issues today (?).


The bureaucratization and legalization of the oppression of Indians and African Americans made it easier for the European colonists and their descendants to rationalize that oppression. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (The Way We Think) have noted how in the human mind the bloody killing of groups of people–such as Native Americans, or later, European Jews—sometimes gets blended with “ordinary bureaucratic frames to produce a blended concept of genocide as an everyday organizational operation. Because the projection to the blend is only partial, certain people who could not bring themselves to operate in the frame of genocide may find themselves operating comfortably in the blend.” For the most part, systems of oppression like Native American genocide and African American slavery are not carried out by human “monsters” with extreme psychological disorders. Most European Americans, including the majority who did not hold people in slavery, supported the “normal” slavery system with their indifference or various forms of collaboration, such as buying and selling slave-produced products in markets. As Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989) has argued in analyzing the recent oppression of European Jews, “Evil can do its dirty work, hoping that most people most of the time will refrain from doing rash, reckless things – and resisting evil is rash and reckless. Evil needs neither enthusiastic followers nor an applauding audience – the instinct of self-preservation will do.


These ideas of Fauconnier, Turner, and Bauman do help make sense out of how “normal,” bureaucratic, and everyday the foundational system of racism has become. Evils, like the highly racist attacks (the white racial framing, again) on Senator Obama and Dr. Wright, now in the several millions on the Internet, or the highly sexist attacks on Senator Clinton, only require most people to stand by passively on the sidelines. And these attacks and the racial/gender framing behind them will help account for the likely loss of either of them to McCain in November. Our centuries- long racist and sexist history makes this quite clear.


I welcome your thoughts and comments on this train of thought.

A series of acts of civil disobedience in response to the verdict in the Sean Bell case are planned throughout New York City today.  While there have been protests all along in this case (like the one in December, pictured here, from Joe Holmes via Flickr), the protests today are unusual because they are happening simultaneously at six locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn.   Described as a “pray-in,” protesters will kneel in pray in the streets to stop traffic during the evening rush hour traffic, and many plan to be arrested.   Rev. Al Sharpton and members of his organization, the National Action Network, are leading the protests aimed at demanding federal authorities bring civil rights charges against the officers in the Sean Bell case. The three officers were acquitted of all charges last month. NYPD and local news channels are expecting large crowds, and I will be there among all the others who are outraged at the taken-for-granted violence against black and brown people in this city.    And, Carol Taylor, said she will be there.  She’s quoted by a local news source saying:

“I was America’s first black flight attendant. I’m 76 and a half years old and I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Similar protests are  planned around the U.S., such as this one in Atlanta.  If you’re in the New York area, it’s time to get out, show up and demand a stop to police brutality.  If you’re outside New York, find a protest near you and join in.  Or, organize your own.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that a racial separatist who contends that only to whites should be U.S. citizens, is running for Superior Court Judge. The candidate is an attorney, William D. Johnson, who favors a constitutional amendment that would grant U.S. citizenship only to whites. The LA Times last month endorsed Johnson’s opponent, James Bianco, but some express concern that if voters are not paying attention close attention to this election, they could vote for candidate that wants to reserve U.S. citizenship exclusively to white people “of the European race.”

The UCLA Chicano Network has a nice summary of the holiday Cinco de Mayo, which is celebrated in Mexican American communities (one such celebration in California last year, pictured right, photo credit) and not yet much outside those communities:

Cinco de Mayo is a date of great importance for the Mexican and Chicano communities. It marks the victory of the Mexican Army over the French at the Battle of Puebla. Although the Mexican army was eventually defeated, the “Batalla de Puebla” came to represent a symbol of Mexican unity and patriotism. . . . Cinco de Mayo’s history has its roots in the French Occupation of Mexico. The French occupation took shape in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War of 1846-48. With this war, Mexico entered a period of national crisis during the 1850’s. Years of not only fighting the Americans but also a Civil War, had left Mexico devastated and bankrupt. On July 17, 1861, President Benito Juarez issued a moratorium in which all foreign debt payments would be suspended for a brief period of two years, with the promise that after this period, payments would resume.


The English, Spanish and French refused to allow president Juarez to do this, and instead decided to invade Mexico and get payments by whatever means necessary. The Spanish and English eventually withdrew, but the French refused to leave. Their intention was to create an Empire in Mexico under Napoleon III. Some have argued that the true French occupation was a response to growing American power and to the Monroe Doctrine (America for the Americans). Napoleon III believed that if the United States was allowed to prosper indiscriminately, it would eventually become a power in and of itself.


In 1862, the French army began its advance. Under General Ignacio Zaragoza, 5,000 ill-equipped Mestizo and Zapotec Indians defeated the French army in what came to be known as the “Batalla de Puebla” on the fifth of May.

Clearly, it was a substantially indigenous army that defeated the mighty Europeans, an early and clear counter-colonialism event. This is an event that all who support self-determination for indigenous peoples and full human rights for all peoples should remember and honor.


The UCLA network account also makes some interesting observations about how this day is differentially celebrated in Mexico and the United States:

In the United States, the “Batalla de Puebla” came to be known as simply “5 de Mayo” and unfortunately, many people wrongly equate it with Mexican Independence which was on September 16, 1810, nearly a fifty year difference. Over, the years Cinco de Mayo has become very commercialized and many people see this holiday as a time for fun and dance. Oddly enough, Cinco de Mayo has become more of Chicano holiday than a Mexican one. Cinco de Mayo is celebrated on a much larger scale here in the United States than it is in Mexico. People of Mexican descent in the United States celebrate this significant day by having parades, mariachi music, folklorico dancing and other types of festive activities.

In my view, this is a good holiday for all those Americans who are opposed to colonialism and imperial invasions to celebrate.

When I taught a graduate seminar this past winter, I asked the class if anyone knew what the word “miscegenation” meant. No one did. And, when I teach at the undergraduate level, it’s the rare student who knows the meaning of that word at the beginning of the semester (they usually know it by the time the semester ends). So, I thought it important to recognize the passing of one of the pioneers in ending the anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S.


Mildred Loving, (pictured with her husband, Richard P. Loving, in a file photo dated 1965, from here), a black woman whose challenge to Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling, died Friday, May 2, 2008 at her home in rural Virginia, her daughter said today. She was 68. From the AP story by Dionne Walker (and a hat tip to my friend Paul at BS for telling me about this):

Loving and her white husband, Richard, changed history in 1967 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld their right to marry. The ruling struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.


“There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the equal protection clause,” the court ruled in a unanimous decision.


Her husband died in 1975. Shy and soft-spoken, Loving shunned publicity and in a rare interview with The Associated Press last June, insisted she never wanted to be a hero — just a bride.


“It wasn’t my doing,” Loving said. “It was God’s work.”

While Loving may have diminished her role as an activist she nevertheless delivered a powerful statement on the 40th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision. Here’s a brief excerpt from Slaves of Academe (full text available there):

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the “wrong kind of person” for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.


I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all.

Powerful words from a woman who claimed not to be an activist. So, why does it matter that I teach my students about the meaning of “miscegenation” when the courts ruled anti-miscegenation laws illegal in 1967? I think it’s important for what it tells us about how white racism operates then and how that same (il)logic continues to work today. In an interesting analysis over at The Faculty Lounge, Katheleen Bergin writes:

Loving is usually described as an “inter-racial” marriage case, but it even goes beyond that. The statute in Virginia didn’t ban “racially mixed marriages ” as the article describes, but only some racially mixed marriages. It made it a felony for “any white person [to] intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person [to] intermarry with a white person.” In other words, Blacks, Native Americans, Asians, or any other persons of color could marry with each other, but could not marry someone who was White. The state’s need to defend “racial integrity” as Virginia claimed fell flat because the statute was designed to preserve White racial purity exclusively. Its one of the quintessential White supremacy cases of the era.

Bergin’s cogent analysis of the old “racial purity” arguments of white supremacy from another era should make us wary of similar kinds of arguments today about supposed racial purity in the era of DNA and genetic testing. And, Loving’s passing is a reminder of the difference that once person can make in fighting against white supremacy.